ASUU Meets Today To Decide On Strike

As students in the nation's universities await the
official response of their lecturers under the
auspices of ,
The much awaited meeting of the National
Executive Committee (NEC) of the Academic Staff
Union of Universities (ASUU) will today hold
following the signing of a Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) between the union and the
federal government on the agreement reached.
The meeting is scheduled to hold at the Federal
University of Technology, Minna, the Niger State
capital.
A decision is expected to be taken at the meeting
on whether the government, by acceding to
ASUU's demand to include its 'fresh' demands in
the now signed MoU, has shown enough good
faith for the union to suspend its six months old
strike, but from all indications, the meeting was
just necessary as it was protocol, as sources
within the ranks of the union say most of the
members of the union are comfortable with the
MoU signed last week.
An ASUU official confirmed the scheduled meeting
to Thisday, saying there was a possibility that
the NEC officials would find the contents of the
MoU acceptable and suspend the strike.
"One of our demands was that the agreements
from the 13 hour meeting be put into a MoU. We
also requested that our people should not be
victimised and the salary arrears should be
paid.
"We asked that all these be included in the MoU.
So, the MoU was our doing and before Dr. Nasir
Fagge signed it publicly, it meant that it was
acceptable to us," the official said.
Last Wednesday, after signing the MoU with the
government representatives, Fagge had given the
assurance that the NEC meeting would hold
within one week.
Speaking during the signing of the MoU, Fagge
had blamed the government for the delay in
resolving the strike.
"If what we had agreed on at that 13-hour
meeting had been judiciously documented and
our members were convinced that it would be
implemented, we would not have wasted this
time because we have a lot of respect for the
Office of Mr. President.
"Our members are intellectuals. It is simply
because over the years particularly, since the
signing of the 2009 agreement, we have been
pursing government to get that agreement
implemented, we only succeeded in getting to
implement a portion of that agreement and here
we are over four years. I think it's never too late
though," Fagge had said.